Nova Scotia has a chance to turn it up a notch

Mike Lazaridis, co-founder of Research in Motion, speaks at the 4Front Atlantic Conference in Halifax on Friday. (ERIC WYNNE / Staff)

MIKE LAZARIDIS, co-founder of Research in Motion, is one of the great engineers of our time. His BlackBerry smartphone has revolutionized communication. It’s fair to call him a practical genius.

Yet speaking Friday to the 4Front Atlantic Conference, an effort by business leaders to help this region succeed in the global economy, Mr. Lazaridis argued that, in the long run, one of the most practical strategies is to foster basic research, even if it has no apparent application.

Consider Albert Einstein’s miracle year, 1905, when the then-obscure patent clerk published theoretical papers on the behaviour of light, the existence of molecules, the nature of space and time, and the relationship of mass and energy.

Funders looking for practical applications wouldn’t have seen much there, said Mr. Lazaridis. But if Einstein had proposed a way to deal with the great urban crisis of the day, what to do with all the horse manure, he’d have been buried in finance opportunities.

The value of creative thinking at the highest level was just one of the economy-energizing themes discussed in Halifax by several hundred business leaders. Fostering talent, seriously increasing immigration, tapping capital and selling into the huge demand created by rising living standards in emerging economies were all discussed and turned into topics for action plans next year. Laudably, no one was calling on government to do it, or even to lead the way.

The basis for the region to succeed on these fronts is there. Firms like John Bragg’s Oxford Frozen Foods are already great innovators (Mr. Bragg having proved his proposition that harvesting blueberries, like hitting a fastball, can be done at night). Irving Oil is putting hundreds of employees through an eMBA to beat its competitors on human capital. The region is bursting with marine sciences and young IT expertise. A $100-million pool of capital has been created by the sale of home-grown firms. There is a keen desire to see schools, universities and workplaces all collaborating in a continuous creative culture. It won’t all happen in a miracle year. But doing it in a miracle decade is certainly within our reach.

In the meantime we still have to eat and no amount of dreaming of things useful only to the future is going to put food on today's table. Promote training of tradesmen and healthcare workers, educate educators, sponsor work for today's workers and invest only your spare time in projects for the future.
And bear in mind, Albert Einstein continued working at the patent office, even as he wrote the papers that would alter our understanding of time, space, and science.
If you want to eat, keep your day job.

If paying for research was the key to success Nova Scotia would be an econmic powerhouse. Halifax has more universities per capitia than most cities on the planet, yet we do not capitalize on any of the research going on there but spend plenty on it, Mike's statement is not true for Nova Scotia, it has been a poor investment funded with deficit spending to make matters worse.